Providing a calm and inviting experience for the visitors of Northwell Health's large website

In partnership with Cooper, the pioneering interaction design firm in San Francisco, and Catabolic Design, we took on the challenge to redesign the website of a vast and complex health system so that it could better communicate with its 47,000 employees and 7-million-person service area. Through deep research into their current structure, employee desires, patient needs, doctor interests, and corporate interests, we were able to develop a set of useful personas to guide us through the massive amounts of information that needed a home on the site.

We discovered and communicated the design through research briefs, an experience attribute schematic, information architecture sitemaps, and a framework consisting of scenarios storyboarded with wireframes that illustrated the flow of a visitor through the site. The visual design was created in response to experience attributes and persona needs, as well as a shared desire to modernize the experience of the website.

Page from one of a series of visitor flow storyboards with accompanying diagram showing where the visitor is in the webatecture.

Along with being the principal visual designer, I played a part in synthesizing the site architecture and interaction design. In leading the visual design effort, I led a client workshop to brainstorm digital experience attributes on which to base the visual design of the interface. We created a modular system for assembling pages quickly and easily, and I created many archetype screens — visual templates for the digital team at Northwell to follow when creating future pages.

Our documentation included a section on how to create pages through our modular system.

The site was launched within a very tight timeline — kudos to the Digital Experience team at Northwell! — and to much accolade. The new look and feel was fresh, modern, and easy on the eyes, while the interaction design quickly led visitors where they want to go.

The former Northshore-Long Island Jewish Health System has since rebranded and changed their name to Northwell Health. We're happy to see that they retained much of our thinkering about the site architecture and patient-first approach.

Before and after of the NS-LIJ website. Molly led the visual design effort.

We provided a highly detailed and informative Digital Experience Design Style Guide to assist future designers and developers of the site.

This digital experience workshop gathered from the North Shore team ideas about what they wanted the site experience to be. Team members placed orange (no) or green (yes) sticky dots on photo printouts, and we discussed what led to those decisions. This conversation directly led to the Experience Attribute schematic, below, which informed the visual design.